Is this true?
According to this morning's South China Morning Post (paid subscription), the average savings rate of Americans is just 1 percent. For Hong Kongers, it is 30 percent. For Mainland Chinese it is a whopping 40 percent. The source for this data is economics Professor Liu of Chinese University in Hong Kong.
I googled and found that same 1% number quoted in the Pioneer Press recently.
That comparison really surprised me. The huge gulf in attitudes about saving. Wow.
I googled and found that same 1% number quoted in the Pioneer Press recently.
That comparison really surprised me. The huge gulf in attitudes about saving. Wow.
Comments
We have a relatively small egg in a savings account, but we contribute significantly more to investments -- but not 40%. You could make the argument that investing in the market is more like gambling and less like saving, but that is not how most people perceive it (at least not until a month ago).
And, assuming that in China many things are provided by the government that are not in America, that may also explain the higher rate of savings in China.
But in China, oddly, I haven't heard much about how much the government gives. Healthcare, for instance, is a pay-in-advance situation, and your family or friends provide your meals, linens, baths, etc. Even for public schools you must buy the uniform and pay tuition. A disabled beggar couple we know from Shekou send their kids to Anhui to live with family there and go to school because they can't afford Shenzhen tuition for their 2 sons. Their sons have hukou for Shenzhen, but it is cheaper to pay the "higher" rate in Anhui for them. And my friend Nannan is divorced, so her daughter lives with a Grandmother in Qingdao where as a child of a divorced woman the tuition is manageable. There was even a problem with her daughter being allowed to be enrolled because of her parents' divorce.
But as I blogged before, Chinese people may tend to spend a lot less on things that Americans spend a lot more on. Living below their means so that Americans could live above ours was the gist of a recent post ( http://jenambrose.blogspot.com/2008/10/standards-of-living.html) based on a Financial Times article.
I'd been under the impression that Communism = bureaucracy
and your posts regarding your trips to Hong Kong certainly reinforce that notion.
Yet, what you describe in this comment seems much less bureaucratic than what we see here in the states.
Intriguing!
I just read the blog entry you refer to. "Living below their means so we could live above ours." The Chinese practices of saving money reminds me of stories/habits of grandparents that lived through the Depression.
Americans may reclaim those habits in my lifetime.
From a Big Fan,
Whimsy